In the user admin script I can click on the name of a record to edit it and that record appears in a form populated by the record ready for editing. The end field contains a password (unused at the moment).

What I want to do is be able to click on a name, and instead of immediately going to the form, bring up a password box so the user can enter their password (held on their record - a hidden field), then the populated form appears.

This way a user can edit their own entry without having to contact the admin person.

The flat-file database (data.txt) is like this:

Smith|John|123 Brown|bill|abc

with abc and 123 being the passwords (field "c").

The actual edit script works fine. It's just getting the form populated that I cannot for the life of me figure out. I have tried a number of ways getting nowhere.

Any ideas? Or, am I trying to do something that is impossible in PERL?

Its definetly possible. All you need is a sort of login page where the user enters all the data needed to validate they are the correct person, name and password I assume.

The form sends the name and password to a script and does a check pretty much like you already have in your script. If it matches correctly, print out a populated form, if not prompt for a retry or print an error message. -------------------------------------------------